We — the cats and I — were watching BirbTV this morning. I might have, for a time, been more interested than the kitties. It was when this beautiful cardinal showed up. She waited patiently, and then waited some more. She approached the bird feeder, then hopped away to a distant branch, and then came back again. You’ll have to forgive the quality of the photo, I was stretching my phone’s digital zoom and shooting through a double-pane window. It was, however, a beautiful bird.
That’s looking to the east. I also stood and looked to the west, taking three photographs before the chill chased me back indoors. The windchill was three degrees. I walked out there in jeans and a long sleeve shirt and house shoes.
Pretty soon we get to the Stockholm Syndrome portion of the winter which, in this case, is when I look up the weather in Stockholm and see that it is essentially the same.
Sigh.
I had only one meeting today, which allowed me the time to catch up on the week’s reading, grading, and make sure my prep for next week is at least underway. (Sunday I’ll start next week’s reading, and Monday I’ll prepare a lecture. And this is the course of most weeks for a while. Unless I get a bolt of energy and get ahead of lecture prep. But that’s never happened, so I am not counting on it.) The meeting today was a virtual meeting.
Have you ever been in a presentation where the presenter reads from their slides? The only thing better than being in a presentation where the presenter is reading from their slides is being in a virtual presentation where the presenter is reading from their slides.
The slides, to be fair, were helpful. I downloaded them for later, and mostly kept making sure I was on mute so the giggles and chuckles didn’t break through the reading. Of the slides. Which were on the screen.
We went over the river tonight and made a little history. Unrivaled, the 3-on-3 women’s basketball league. There was a doubleheader, and also history. The crowd set a new record for attendance of a regular season women’s basketball game. There were 21,490 people announced. They watched the Breeze and the Phantom, both teams filled with stars the crowd knew.
The Phantom won, 71-68. I like the timing rules. They play on a slightly smaller court — which changes the style of play — and then play three 7-minute quarters. In the fourth quarter it’s a race, first to plus-11. At the end of the 3rd, the score was 53-60, so the first team to 71 would be the winner. That format takes out a lot of the timeout and fouling gamesmanship that characterizes the traditional version of the sport. And it adds tension, too. I assume that at that stage of the game the fatigue is setting in for one team and desperation for the other, because that race to the final score was frantic, and fun.
It’s also meant to speed up the game, which it seemed to do. But there’s a flaw in the doubleheader setup. The time between the two games was interminable, even with the assistance of the hype squad, the mic woman (who had to be paid in Red Bull, for she was, herself very hype), and also a local rapper who has a big viral hit. The second game was set to begin at 9:30, and it started at about 9:40. It was between the Rose and the Lunar Owls, which is a great team name, obviously.
Maybe there’s a media component to this, there can’t be any other reason to drag out a 9:30 start. You are certainly not waiting for anyone to get into the venue at that point. But you are getting in the way of my dinner.
The Lunar Owls won 75-85, on the strength of Marina Mabrey’s 47 points, including the game winner. She had 27 of those in the first quarter, which is a league record, and the hoop must have looked 12-feet wide for her. She’s played all over the world, but grew up about an hour away. Must have been a nice homecoming.
Anyway, back to my dinner. We ordered Chick-fil-A from a nearby store. Went through the drive-thru. They’ve updated their app and now there’s no upsell point. This is why that’s a problem. You plug in your order, put in your car, and now, instead of seeing a person, you scan a QR code when you get there. Used to be, that person would confirm the order. They’d ask “Would you like to add anything?” But now there’s not an option for that. What if you’d changed your mind? What if you needed to add something? We got our sandwiches and then went through again, just to prove the point, and also to get a milkshake.
The new app and mobile ordering process violates Smith’s First Rule of Economics (1997): Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you.
It’s an ironclad rule.
